


the hawk & the falcon

by am_fae



Category: Ogniem i Mieczem | With Fire and Sword (1999), Trylogia | The Trilogy - Henryk Sienkiewicz
Genre: Alternate History, Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Era, Historical Inaccuracy, I guess :p, M/M, Poetry, Seduction, if you saw the last eps of the borgias you know the messy illiteracy angst i'm going for here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2020-12-01
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:21:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27794503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/am_fae/pseuds/am_fae
Summary: A Ruthenian gentleman offers to join Jurko Bohun's forces after the Cossacks' victory in Lviv.Or a blatant ripoff of The Borgias (TV), ft. dubious translations of Jan Kochanowski.
Relationships: Jurko Bohun/Jan Skrzetuski
Comments: 6
Kudos: 17





	the hawk & the falcon

**Author's Note:**

> I'd like to thank my sponsors: if you haven't already you should totally check out [this work of art](https://flurgburgler.tumblr.com/post/180217085413/a-sketch-that-got-away-from-me-during-my-ogniem-i) by @flurgburgler and [this one](https://plain-and-simple-ninja.tumblr.com/post/616337869365215232/jan-skrzetuski-micha%C5%82-%C5%BCebrowski) by @plain-and-simple-ninja on tumblr; they inspired & motivated this!  
> Any messiness will be blamed on the Borgias (a terrible show btw). I have lifted very much from a specific gay subplot, but I recommend you read my fic instead of watching the horrible way a similar plotline unfolded on screen :)

It hadn’t been uncommon for lesser Ruthenian nobles to look at Bohun with a kind of respect on the streets of Kyiv and Bratslav. Sometimes he thought it was because, with a sabre at his side and jeweled fastenings on his kontusz or caftan, he looked a noble himself. Other times, and as he grew in fame, it grew more clear.

All the scraps of Bohun’s tattered pride came together in looking down on these men of the petty nobility. Sometimes they had come to the Sich, throwing in their lot with those of the Cossack starshyna officers who were their neighbors, sometimes friends. They spoke of Rus’ in Polish that came easily, flowed naturally from their lips like air. They wrote. On occasion, they wrote of him. Sometimes thin and angry, too often their full faces spoke of some land and some health. They had known the loving hand of some family guardian, the stewardship of some lettered parish priest.

Khmelnytsky, while not of their set, spoke like them, and at first Bohun had scowled to hear it. Kryvonis, standing near at hand, had clapped his shoulder hard, and he had trusted that more.

The glory he would tear from this land, from the hearts of its people, would burn brighter than any seal of nobility. It would scorch away the cold and dirt of his orphan past. No death held any terror for Jurko Bohun but one that would silently, ignominiously return him to that soil.

And now. Now, after the siege of Lviv, in the burning, gilded city, his men had dragged before him this ragged-looking figure in a red kontusz, an empty scabbard at his side. Bohun had taken the city’s ransom, passed it to his Cossacks—what need had he of gold?—and told them more was waiting beyond the walls.

The man looked young. Ash dusted his dark hair. In the light of the fires, his face appeared a lean, dark smear, an aquiline nose and chapped lips appearing and vanishing once more into shadow as the flames flickered and leapt. Bohun’s brow furrowed, gaze following it.

The boy holding him had a smear of soot on his cheek, and grinned bravely at his ataman. Bohun liked him. “I’d’ve struck him down on account of his clothes, but he wanted to be taken to you.”

The young man coughed. The sound, hoarse and ashy, scraped at Bohun’s ear. “Ataman,” he said, and managed to stumble to his knees. “Don’t strike. I would join you.”

The hoarse voice and its accent made Bohun raise his chin, as if he, and not this noble, were the one on his knees. He grinned at him something sharp.

“Join Khmelnytsky, panie?”

His Cossack boy released the young man’s arm, and he stumbled further. He nodded and wiped at the soot on his cheek. He raised his eyes to Bohun’s, and Bohun saw that they were dark, like his hair.

The noble boldly held his gaze.

“Why not, ataman?”

Bohun looked him up and down slowly, lingeringly—his look, jagged, softened as it lingered. The nobleman did not move, and neither did his prone form go rigid and stiffen, the way Bohun did when looked at. He merely gazed up at him, something knowing and warm about his dark eyes and weathered face. It intrigued Bohun: he had never seen it before.

“Don’t you know how many of us were waiting for you, here? Us—Ruthenian gentlemen. Didn’t you think our hearts were with you?”

Yet Bohun hardly heard the words, despite their speaker addressing his plural “you”s as if for his ears alone. Bohun—the hero falcon of the steppes—should like, perhaps, to hear it sung that he spared the man out of grace. Had he stopped to think longer on it. Had he thought longer on it, indeed, he should have realized it was not from this at all that the man still lived.

“What do they call you?”

“Jan.”

The noble stayed close by his side, like a dog at heel. When Bohun’s men dispersed in the dark morning hours among those unruined buildings of the town, Bohun stayed awake, drinking occasionally from a bottle of sweet wine he’d found in the townhouse where he stood, nerves too alight after the fight and its ensuing revels for any kind of rest. Other men found women for such moments, he thought, and yet such reprieve held little appeal for him now. Nothing could quench them but music or drink.

He glanced sidelong towards the table and was almost surprised to see the nobleman still there, sitting arranged next to a window framed by shattered panes of glass. He seemed to gaze out, as if searching for something—someone.

“Ey, little bird, you don’t need to stay,” Bohun said. His head prickled with the unfamiliar presence of the wine, and he wanted the man—Jan—to look at him.

Jan scratched at the stubble forming on his sharp jaw and smiled, turning. “I think I should, when I plan to leave with you.”

Bohun, strangely gratified by the sight of him, could not resist the tinge of scorn that curled his lip. “You know the city, don’t you?”

“Of course,” Jan said lightly.

Bohun’s feet were moving towards him as if of their own accord. He passed over the half-empty bottle and Jan took it. He raised the bottle to his lips. The line of his throat was lovely and golden in the firelight as he swallowed.

Bohun felt himself swallow too. “You’re not a prisoner here.”

Something sparked in the nobleman’s eyes. Bohun didn’t understand why he was smiling. “Am I not?”

He grinned, letting his eyes rake over Jan’s pose at the window. “I think you should know if you were, panie.”

Jan’s lashes flickered downwards, a soft, dark shadow over his cheek. An ironic smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. It looked soft, Bohun thought through the wine, and his hands itched to have the bottle back again.

“Will you be sleeping tonight, ataman?”

 _What did that have to do with anything?_ The sky behind Jan’s red-clothed shoulders was already lightening. Bohun shrugged and took the wine back. His fingers brushed Jan’s on the warmed glass.

Jan was watching him again. He stripped off the kontusz and Bohun’s heartbeat quickened like a bird startled into flight before Jan folded it roughly into a pillow and settled himself in a corner of the formerly rich chamber, stretched out on the floorboards. His underclothes showed where his żupan fell across his sprawled body—close-fit trousers and the peek of a shirt that might have been white.

Bohun supposed he was a brave man, to appear so at ease: but surely not a soldier. He downed the rest of the bottle, setting it down on the table with an unsteady clink. The noble smiled up at him.

“You won’t seek repose after the battle?”

Bohun gestured expansively at the empty bottle. “I have it.”

Jan’s teeth flashed briefly. While he had been shaken when Bohun had first encountered him, now he seemed to settle. “You’ll have to forgive me if my eyes close.”

When they did at last—somehow—Bohun stayed awake. The wine swirled and sparked hazily in his head, making his gaze linger longer. In that slow dawn solitude he truly felt himself in a daze, in a dream. He looked at the noble who claimed his loyalty, really looked at the mussed dark hair, the tired circles beneath the shadowy lashes, the aristocratic lines of the young face, and his hands wished for the strings of his teorban. He looked at the scratches and smudges of ash on the noble’s pale gold throat and found himself grateful the young man was not dangling somewhere in the city from the rafters of a house, coarse rope squeezing out his life or a hook shoved through his chest at the delicate curve of rib.

The noble woke in haste at the sounds of Bohun’s picked Cossacks assembling to depart. Bohun’d been of a mind to leave him to carve out whatever fate the charred new world might offer—had tried to banish the idea of bringing him after them, like some attendant. _Or a camp follower_ , he thought, chest twisting _._ And if nobles could join the Cossacks’ ranks, the men of Bohun’s own regiment were proven men, tested in fire.

“You didn’t think you could get rid of me so easily, ataman? The city holds little charm after your good work.”

Bohun shrugged. “Dead weight.”

“I’m good with a pistol,” Jan said, wrapping the discarded kontusz across his chest, his lips twisted in a wry smile. “I don’t intend to hold you back.”

Bohun glanced at Elyashenko. The old esaul’s eyes were weary and kind. He shrugged again, and Jan fell in with them as half the regiment left Lviv.

He was careful, at first—careful not to assign the noble any watches alone, not to let him wander too far. The restraining role of a commanding officer and its tedious details came reluctantly to him when they did at all. It was more out of contempt than anything else that he ensured it: after all, who could Bohun trust to do a job right if not his own men?

Who could he distrust, if not the Commonwealth’s nobles?

When the choice once fell as they made camp on the steppe to leave Jan under the command of Ivan, a boy who already seemed half smitten with the noble’s easy smiles, or take him alone on a scout, Bohun chose the latter and didn’t think about it too hard.

“Get up.”

Jan rose, casting one last quiet remark Ivan’s way. The boy stifled a grin.

“With me,” Bohun said.

When they were mounted up and Ivan’s campfire was a faint blur of smoke against the green hills in the distance, Jan turned his way, head cocked to the side.

“You don’t trust me.”

So he had noticed Bohun’s attempts to keep an eye on him. _And?_

“Why should I, panie?” He placed extra stress on the last word. The thought flashed that he had revealed too much and he turned his face away.

Jan fell back a moment, apparently subdued. When he looked up his amber eyes glinted. “And you don’t think I could be dangerous with you?”

Bohun held his gaze until he blushed and Bohun couldn’t help but laugh, a laugh that showed his teeth.

“Ey, little bird,” Bohun said, still grinning. “No, I don’t think so.”

When Bohun returned from his watch at the ruined stanitsa ruddy light seeped through the cloth of the small tent they had pitched.

Jan lay on his bedroll propped on one elbow, and Bohun could not breathe for looking at him.

He should have been angry. He should have—

The candle guttered out and left him with the memory of golden light and the warm immediate feeling of Jan’s skin giving way under his hands in the darkness. He clutched Jan to him like a starving man.

“Jurko,” Jan moaned.

It should have been nothing. It wasn’t as if Jurko Bohun hadn’t—hadn’t sought that kind of relief. It had never truly brought him relief. It had never been like this. With Jan’s lean, sweat-sheened body shuddering beneath him, offering himself up into his grasping hands, Bohun, bewildered, sensed the outer extreme of some peace. He was closer to it than he had been at Helena’s threshold. What could—how—

“I was right then,” Jan gasped, low voice curved by a smile in the half-darkness.

Right?

Bohun held him closer, making him gasp. “I want you.” _How are you doing this?_

Jan grinned, arching up against him, slim hips sinuous. “I can tell.” His dark eyes were nearly as black as _hers_ , neat hair disheveled against Bohun’s bedroll. “Are you going to take me, then?”

 _Fuck, paniczyk, if you only knew_. He kissed Jan’s smiling mouth and reached for him.

Bohun woke to Jan’s mussed hair tickling his nose. The morning sun cast its pale rays over their bodies. The light caressed Jan, he thought. It was if everything so ordinary—skin and sweat and rough cloth, the dull, pervasive scent of campfire smoke—had become somehow sacred, softer, sweeter to savor. He watched the nobleman wake, yawning and wiping drool away with a corner of bedding, shoulders rolling as he stretched away the aches of exhausting themselves and sleeping tangled on the hard ground.

“Like what you see?”

Caught in a bewildered daze, Bohun simply stared.

Jan’s mouth curled up. He shifted towards him, turning his face towards his. His brown eyes were so warm lit by the sun that Bohun’s fingers itched suddenly for his teorban to sing of them. “Good morning,” he was saying. It was an unexpected falter in his voice, the first so far, that made Bohun focus. The noble had spoken with the muzzy roughness of sleep; it vanished abruptly, like a missed and jarring note. “I hope you’re not the type for regrets, ataman.”

Bohun grabbed his jaw and kissed him hard.

“Good,” Jan panted.

They were late returning to the main camp, but neither Ivan nor any of the others would have thought to question him. Bohun rode out ahead, trying to lose the ache that had settled in his chest in the rushing wind and grass that were his most familiar refuge. When his heart beat as fast as he could play and his horse’s sides foamed, it faded. But he wasn’t alone, and as Jan drew close, his laughter caught in the wind, so the warmth returned, that straining that frightened him, so near the ashes in his past. Yet for a moment, with the swirling sky above, Bohun’s heart’s blood ran so hot and he had lost himself so much that he felt free, freer even drawn towards Jan’s lean form at his side. In that moment he prayed.

 _God and all the saints, let him not hurt me_. It was selfish, desperate: Bohun only reached for the divine for comfort, for the knowing eyes of icons in churches that had sometimes sheltered a cold, starving orphan. That would continue to do so, while the ground where Rozłogi’s walls had stood was a dark patch of soot. _I’ll light a candle when we get to Kyiv. A hundred candles._

When the band settled for the night, Jan lingered, firelight gilding his jaw, the fastenings of his crimson kontusz.

“Did you really cross the Nenasytets alone?”

Bohun grinned at him. “Yes.”

“We heard things about you in—Lviv, but everywhere I’ve been.”

He laughed, but felt his cheeks heat despite himself. “Where have you been?”

Jan shrugged. “Here and there. Ah—the Crimea once.”

“In captivity?” His blood sparked with fury. How would a gentleman of his sort have seen that kind of action? It didn’t matter. They would pay—

The noble looked alarmed. “Christ, no! As a clerk.”

“I would have thought that beneath your station,” Bohun rasped, feeling his breath calm.

Jan made a wry face. “So had I. But tell me…”

As the fire banked to coals, Bohun covered it, all too aware of bending to do a servant’s task. Jan stood by and joined him walking to his tent, picking between other ragged structures and bedrolls spread on the grass. He hadn’t seen Jan set up his own. Choked by fear and hope, each tugging at each other, Bohun glanced a question, and Jan spoke quietly.

“I would rather not be parted from you.”

His hand trailed over Bohun’s shoulder, warm through the rich fabric of the caftan. Bohun trembled, the fearful longing stronger than ever, and made a low noise of agreement, as if it meant nothing to him.

By the time they reached Kyiv, Jan had won over most of the men. Ivan clasped his hand and blushed; old Elyashenko greeted him with a smile. Bohun held tightly to him and fucked him hard enough to leave bruises. There was some grim pleasure in seeing the shape of his lowborn hands left on those hips, in hearing Jan’s ragged cries.

The city spread out before them, cathedral domes gleaming. A hundred thousand places Jan could disappear to, people he would prefer. Bohun’s horse tossed his head, mouth foaming with exertion, as the beating hooves slowed. Bohun’s hands were white-knuckled on the reins, on his leather-wrapped nagaika.

“Ataman.”

It was Elyashenko’s quiet voice. Jan had hung back from him, though Bohun knew he nearly kept pace when he chose, had heard the nobleman’s startled laugh on the wind before with teasing calls to challenge. Maybe he sensed that today Bohun was as dangerous as his coiled whip.

 _Not just today._ He heard Helena again, cursing his name. He could not curse himself enough.

He glanced the old esaul’s way with madness looking out through his eyes.

“He’s asking about you,” the old man said, stubbornly unfazed. It was one of the reasons Bohun treasured him. “The _pan_.”

Bohun snarled. “What could he be asking for?”

Elyashenko didn’t look away. He didn’t answer either and turned the subject away, reproach clear in the line of his kind mouth. “Wants to know where we’ll stay in Kyiv.”

“He thinks I’ll let him keep on with me?"

The esaul’s eyes dimmed and pain clawed at Bohun’s throat.

“Ey, ataman. Don’t take such a heavy hand with that one.”

Bohun looked sidelong at him. _Why not?_ he wanted to growl. But hope tore at him like a carrion bird, sensing red blood and weakness.

“He’s fond of you,” the old man said carefully.

Bohun laughed. If he had not laughed, he would have wept with how much he wanted to believe it. “Maybe!”

Bohun found a room in Kyiv with two windows and a door that latched. It might have been recently vacated; with money ready at hand, he did not care to learn. He drank sweet nobles’ wine, the kind he had been unused to before—before Lviv’. When it didn’t reach him quick enough, he drank gorzałka, raw, bitter, familiar. The liquor at last numbed his mind, making the room spin as he fell back onto the bed, a poor pallet with rich bedding. He thought he saw Jan, and behind him, _her_ , telling him to go. He downed the last of the wine in an uncouth swig and wished the slender neck of the bottle were Jan’s lips. He woke to blinding sunlight and stabbing pain in his head, a foul taste in his dry mouth, and reached with a shaking hand for the pitcher of gorzałka that stood by on the floor.

Someone was knocking on the door.

He cursed. When it didn’t stop, he dragged himself to his feet—he hadn’t even taken his boots off—fumbling for the hilt of his sabre.

Bohun unlatched the damned thing, and blinked, eyes widening.

Jan stood in the doorway, handsome face pale and drawn. Bohun’s head spun: the man looked as if he hadn’t slept since they had parted the day before.

He dragged Jan into the room and slammed the door shut behind him. Something was building within him, a storm he was too dizzy and weak-minded to ward off.

“Do you know what you’ve done?” he hissed, shaking. “You have to choose.”

_I must be mad. I must be—_

Jan looked offended. “Ataman—"

Bohun shook his head. With Jan before him, the wanting was a hunger. It was too much to have him a few steps away, knowing how it had been to have him close. “Ey, what have you done to me? I must be mad.”

His hand was at the hilt of his sabre, gripping it tightly. Jan was quiet, dark eyes constant, and he thought, proud.

“You have to choose,” Bohun said again, desperation twisting the words. “Stay here with me. Here, in this room. It will be hard for you, little bird. The place is wretched, but I can buy… I would give you anything you could ask for. Do what I say and wait for me when I go on the hetman’s business. Or leave now and never cross my path again, because if you do, I _will_ kill you.”

The words came out in a rush and it struck him how ugly they were, how little like a song.

He stopped. Jan was watching him nervously, but steadily. Bohun took a heavy breath. It was as if the man had sunk thorny vines about his chest. And yet the feeling was… too vast, like the thorns had cracked open spaces in him rather than entrapping.

And yet he was trapped.

He broke the silence. “I… I would like it if you stayed.”

Jan smiled like honey and made as if to go to him. Bohun nearly flinched back. Then he swayed on his feet and reached for him, yanking Jan in for a kiss that tasted of sweetness and something else that was all Jan’s own. The recognition of it made Bohun dizzy.

“I’ll be here,” Jan promised.

Bohun had never lived in company with someone like this. At first it was like being drunk all the time.

Jan liked accompanying him in the city, though grime coated their boots and though refugees from the countryside pressed in crowds. As the air grew chill, Jan once bought sugared chestnuts from a seller and offered them to him. Bohun, put in mind of others extending their palms to him with crumbs, first snapped that he could pay himself—then cursed himself for saying too much.

“Must you always make things difficult?” Jan said, shaking his head. “I wasn’t going to give you _all_ of them.”

For some reason Bohun’s startled grumbling made Jan grin. “God sees my suffering that I live with such a man.”

He watched the smile, bewildered and entranced. The taste of burnt sugar lingered in his mouth on the journey back.

Jan had a book with him which he had somehow kept safe since Lviv, one with a leather binding (albeit plain) Bohun knew to be expensive. He would read it sprawled out on their bed or at the lone table and sometimes make pencil marks in it. When Bohun flipped through the thing, they’d appear, like faint ghosts.

“What does it say?” he’d asked once. He lay on the pallet, still exhausted and happy from another round of lovemaking. The words had come easier like that, so that his ignorance had no longer stifled him.

Jan glanced down from the table, amber eyes dark. “Poetry,” he said simply, and proffered the book, laying aside a pencil.

Bohun’s brow furrowed. Of all the things he had expected, this had not been among them. “Silent, on the page? Song doesn’t live like that.” He dropped his head back against the pillows and did not take it. “Besides, it wouldn’t do me any good.”

Unseen to him, something eased in the line of Jan’s shoulders. “You—?”

“I can’t read.” Even like this, it pricked at him, and he grinned to bare his teeth. “Shocked, _panie?_ ”

“By no means,” Jan said easily. He shrugged. “Just comes with working as a clerk.”

Bohun fell back again, listening to the soft scratch of the pencil on the fine pages. He would not know which verses, which lines, Jan was marking, which had caught his focused gaze and held his attention. Instead he studied the incomprehensible cracks on the plastered ceiling. Spreading outward, if you squinted they could be birds’ wings and stars.

“…that hand, in which my heart is enclosed,” Jan said softly in Polish.

Bohun looked up abruptly, eyes flicking open.

“Oh, stupid, crazy thoughts!” Jan’s voice gained strength and warmth. “For what do I long? For what am I standing here, an unhappy man? Looking at you, I lost all my power; I have no speech.” The words had grown quiet. Bohun was frozen, transfixed. “A secret flame comes over me. There is sound in my ears, and night sets in with double eyes.”

He scrambled to sit up, propping himself up on his elbows. “Do you—” But he couldn’t ask, so far had the spell worked upon him. “I know this feeling. I _know_ this. For so long.” It pierced him to hear it echoed from Jan’s lips, unfamiliar and yet fitting so perfectly there.

Jan’s eyes lit with something that slipped from definition, a strange alloy of happiness. “Not all are like that. But I know that too.”

Bohun cast about for something out of reach. “I would not have said it so. But…”

Jan blinked away whatever had clouded his gaze. “But what, my Jurko?”

“But it’s right,” he decided. The rhyming verse was set in his memory now, where he could savor its cadence, the turns of the Polish lines in Jan’s voice. Tears pricked his eyes, and he wondered if Jan knew how precious the gift was he had given him.

He must have known something, because the pallet bent suddenly under Jan’s weight. Jan knelt over him, leaning down to chase a kiss. With deepening instinct, he put his arms around Jan’s waist, and Jan sighed as if in relief.

Bohun traced the line of his jaw with a reverent, wondering hand. “Do you have more?”

“Brother atamans, half of Poland is against us.” Khmelnytsky spoke in a way that drew you in, his hand a fist on the table before him. He held court in Pereyaslav in a chamber crowded with Cossack officials and men of the cloth. Bohun was close at hand on his left, Kryvonis closer, at the right across from him: the former dark-haired with an air of affected carelessness; the latter redheaded, with nothing veiling the fire in his eyes. “Oh, there’s nothing to fear from their militia…”

Bohun studied the room through the smoke that rose from fine candles and coarser tobacco pipes.

 _What is it?_ Jan had asked in Ruthenian. _I could join you, if—_

_No, dove._

Jan’s mouth had curved up, hand trailing over the frogged fastenings of his caftan. _You don’t want me there, ataman?_

“—but Jarema.” Khmel brought down his fist. “Wiśniowiecki is the worst of them.”

“Everyone fears him.” Kryvonis spat, to show that he did not.

“Ey, that’s right,” the old koshevoi ataman murmured. One of the priests crossed himself quietly.

Khmelnytsky continued as if uninterrupted. “And this monster sends scouts into our territory. Burns crops and villages in his wake—slaughters peaceful people!” Those magnetic eyes looked out at the gathered men. “Who stands against him?”

“You!”

Khmel shook his head slowly. “My hands are tied, brothers. The king’s commissioners speak of peace, not war.”

“Traitors,” spoke Kryvonis. His eyes burned. Bohun found himself nodding.

Khmel cast him a look. The new king’s buława shone brightly at his belt. “Be that as it may, I cannot move against him in force.” He drew in a breath, surveying the room. “Who among you, brothers, does not fear the terrible prince? We must know his positions, and I have need of daring men.”

His gaze fixed on the man at his left. Bohun downed his glass and bared his teeth. “I’m not afraid.” It was the lie on which his existence was built.

“Of course not, Jurko,” Kryvonis grinned, reaching out to clasp his arm. “If you were, you wouldn’t have taken Wasylówka!”

“A true Cossack,” Khmel agreed. His eyes were intent as he raised his own glass in a toast, and the cheers of the company went to Bohun’s head, sparking his blood as he jumped to the table.

He returned to the city still smelling of smoke: exhilarated and exhausted. After a week in the saddle, his horse’s hooves and then, his aching feet took him in only one direction, pain searing along one arm.

Dawn was breaking over Kyiv on Bohun’s triumphant return; as he moved with increasing haste through the town’s winding streets, the sun rose in a soft grey haze against walls and windows, slow and patient. Few enough gathered to call out to him. Bohun’s heart, racing from action, beat again like a war drum, like the plucked strings of his teorban, with quickening steps.

There at last was the cursed old townhouse—or blessed—the dawn glinting rosily against _his_ window a ways up—

Bohun brushed past a lodger hanging laundry in her alcove and ran the last flight of narrow stairs, boots thundering on the worn and fragile wood. He couldn’t feel any pain in his shoulder, only the burning of his own weak heart, like a guttering flame—

He paused at the threshold.

 _I’m not afraid!_ The words were a snarl.

Bohun burst the door open at one blow, snapping the chain that latched it. In the clattering silence he stood there, trembling.

A familiar figure moved in the bed, sitting up slouched beneath their blankets.

“Jurko?” It was Jan’s voice, still bleary and familiar, and Jan who rose to meet him, covers falling away as he did so, for all the world like a handsome rusalka, some revenant spirit. Bohun could not really believe he was there.

He drew Jan to him as reverently as he might kiss an icon in a church. His hands, greedy and grasping, grazed over the lines of Jan’s form, the linen of his loose shirt that fell so sweetly over the strong curve of broad shoulders and neat waist. Jan moaned at his touch—a low, soft sound.

Bohun tugged him closer, one arm half across Jan’s chest, kissing his throat and breathing in the scent of him like air, like wine, like clear water—

“Ataman,” Jan sighed, arching into his kisses. “Ataman, please.” But the way he said the word then did not make Bohun think of any of its many associations in his long and varied memory. Jan said “please” as if he were content already.

Bohun smiled against Jan’s neck. His teeth caught lightly in the golden skin, and he savored the answering whine.

“You stayed,” he said in Ruthenian, bending so his brow rested against the nape of Jan’s neck.

“I wouldn’t leave,” Jan whispered back. He twisted slightly towards him, a smile blossoming on his lips. “How could I,” he teased, “when all I could do was think on your return?”

The words scared Bohun the way a horse spooks at shadows on the steppe, imagining it sees some peril, some movement ahead and just beyond the range of eyesight: but they also drew at something deep within him, that he had hardly known himself. Known only, perhaps, through the resentful gazes of a dark-haired kniazówna and the cruel mistress of her house, and the rough roof of a steppe manor.

It beat in the hot pulse at Jan’s throat, so much kissed by Bohun’s lips. And it was more solid than the shadows.

The next time Bohun was summoned Jan sat at his side, leaning back against Bohun’s arm. The warmth of his thigh next to Bohun’s distracted him. So did the working of his throat when he knocked back gorzałka like a soldier, smirking at the brotherhood’s amusement. When Khmel’s Polish scribe was indisposed, Jan briefly took over the function, ink arcing over the hetman’s paper in clean lines like the distant wings of birds. Secret. But there was something pure in it, Bohun thought uncharacteristically: in the nobleman’s steady gaze, his single-minded focus.

 _Didn’t you think our hearts were with you?_ Bohun had dismissed it at first. Some men would say anything to avoid death. Yet he knew with increasing sureness that Jan was not that type of man.

Once Bohun woke in the night to find Jan awake, and he thought, writing. He heard the faint scratch of a pen against precious paper. The book was open before him.

Jan saw him looking. The nobleman’s eyes were dark in the moonlight.

“Come back to bed,” Jurko said.

“One moment, love,” Jan said softly, voice blurred.

Bohun propped his head up with his hand/himself up by one elbow. “More poetry? Whatever needs be said, you can say it to me.” He shook a stray lock of hair from his eyes. “It only lives in your voice.”

Jan did come to bed then, kissing him with a sweet urgency that bordered on desperation.

“Love you,” Bohun said blearily.

Jan kissed him again. With Jan’s arms around him, their legs tangled together, contentment washed over Bohun’s wild heart like the sea. How new it still felt, how strange!

He had nearly fallen asleep when Jan’s whisper woke him to the darkness. “Have you ever felt wretched?”

 _Yes._ Bohun tensed, turning to look at him. Jan’s face was shadowed; he was faintly aware of the noble’s hand toying with a curling lock of his black hair where it splayed messily onto the pillow.

“Like… Like you were trapped.” He heard Jan swallow.

“Tell me,” Bohun said. He thought again of Helena, of the way they had watched each other, from one prison to the other. For so long he’d believed that he would never escape those knowing, fearful eyes.

“And there’s… a weight on you, like a millstone.” His fingers touched Bohun’s hair as gently as if it were silk. “Reminding you how small, how slight you are. How _low_. Everything that remains to be done is so much greater than you it could crush you in a moment. But you’ll let it. You’ll let it.”

Bohun tugged Jan closer. He knew not of what Jan spoke, but tenderness gripped him suddenly, like a vise. The warmth of his limbs against his own had never felt more precious, and through the haze of sleep Bohun felt his blood spark into flames at imagined foes. “I would stop it. I’d keep it from you.”

Jan made a strangled noise in his throat and hugged him back. He turned his face against Bohun’s shoulder, hiding it from view.

There was a sheet tucked into Jan’s book that fell out as he thumbed through it, and on the page, in Jan’s slanted handwriting, he thought he recognized the signs for his own name, the only words he could read. He had forced his hand to learn them after being only able to mark a cross, on the registry.

Jan opened the door as he squinted at it, paling a little in the golden autumn air.

“What does it say?” Bohun said lowly.

Jan leaned close, kissing his jaw; Bohun didn’t realize until afterwards that the paper was no longer in his hands. He spoke from memory, something calling out from the rhymed words. There was a charge to them, soft and dark as a storm cloud.

“And for this you kill me, O wild robber,

So that not only Orpheus praising the gods

Was petrified by a lightning bolt from on high,

But I, too, am tainted by you for my desire.” Jan inhaled; Bohun felt the soft brush of his breath, as if before a dive, the lean body tensing against him. “But:

“Be it every bloody wound you inflict,

Or a livable captivity under a graceful lord,

As you wish it, so it brings my happiness.

I don’t want to push; I have something to make my sad heart glad.

And you, Love, by God, won’t look; whether it’s your rage I feel,

Or your favor, let me love this one to death!”

Afterwards it was a time before the thought crept coldly into Bohun’s head: the thought that Jan lied. It clung to his heels like a ghost. He began to watch more carefully: Jan gave him the same dazzling smiles, daily carried out the same simple traceable movements, greeted him with the same sweet kisses that Bohun struggled to treat with any scrutiny.

 _He loves me_ , he told himself. _He loves you, coarse, stupid peasant!_

But he lay awake sometimes with the other man’s warmth by his side and his heart clenched as if someone had opened his chest, reached in and wrenched out his joy. Bohun had so rarely been happy. Deep in his restless bones he knew it would not last.

Finally he took to leafing through Jan’s book, Jan’s papers, whenever Jan was otherwise occupied. He looked at what Jan had been writing, copying something—the lach poetry—over from one sheet to another. Making a cleaner copy, Bohun had thought. Jan had crumpled the first and tossed it into the fire, where it had flared briefly and died into dark ash. Only a nobleman would have such wasteful habits, Bohun had observed. Jan had colored and then shot back that Bohun doused velvet and silk in tar. _Ey, that’s right,_ Bohun had said, grinning with wolfish delight. _To show my contempt._

“Contempt?” Jan snorted. “Has it never occurred to you that if you truly contemned those finer stuffs, you would never have bothered with them in the first place?”

“No,” Bohun said obdurately. “And it never will.”

He squinted at the remaining sheet: the one Jan had left folded between the book’s pages. Something about those haltingly scratched symbols called to him the way men feel a lure to step forward, standing on the edge of a great height. Blindly he scanned the neat lines, fixing them in his memory like a picture.

 _It is nothing. It’s nothing._ He could not have said why he’d fixated on the rough pages. It was the fear of any corner of Jan that still remained unknown, and whatever could lurk there. He could not reach it, just as he had not reached the limits of Jan’s love. Both scared him.

The fine room was chill without Jan’s presence, despite the glowing stove. Bohun closed his eyes, seeing the signs in the darkness behind his eyelids. His hands, so clever and delicate on the strings of the teorban, were clumsy taking out a blank scrap of Jan’s paper, and bitterness choked him like ink. _In this I might as well have been raised swinging a scythe_. The version he made was blotted, coarse, and through a particularly ungainly spill he’d ruined just the edge of the precious book’s binding at one corner, black bleeding slowly through the well-loved pages, like a devil’s fingerprint.

 _It’s nothing._ But Bohun looked at the stain on the heady words Jan had shared with him, the courtly lach words that had found purchase in his wild soul and resounded there, and found himself biting back a cry of pain, like a wounded animal that would not draw predators or carrion-eaters.

He kept the ugly thing in the pocket of his caftan, against his breast. Often looking at the fire in the stove, he thought he would burn it and dismiss his doubt forever. _It’s unworthy of you_. That was what Jan often said when he intended to rebuke Bohun for some slight, usually with a smile or a whine.

 _No, it is worthy,_ Bohun thought bitterly. Jan did not know him as he did. _Too much._

“Still there, my Bacchus?” Jan smiled, stamping snow and mud from his boots. Cooler air rushed in from the stairwell. Jan’s handsome brow furrowed. “Are you cold?”

Cold? Bohun would have snorted. This isn’t cold. _Not the way I know it._

_You tell me, kalyno, how you came to settle here…_

“Jurko?”

Jan’s voice was familiar as a worn wool coat, as sweet as bird’s milk. The words of a wedding lament rose to Bohun’s mind:

_But they plucked my boughs; they made great bunches—_

_But one day they married me; as I was bidden_

_I married—my blinded eyes, forever hidden._

_Is there no river that I may drown in? Was there none other_

_Than he, the youth to whom they wed me, father and mother?_

Khmelnytsky frowned at the paper. Bohun ached to tear the damn thing to shreds.

“And so?” he exploded. “What does it say?”

Khmelnytsky set the paper down. “Did you get this right?”

“Ey, I can’t read—I’m not stupid.” He tore the inscrutable thing from Khmel’s hands, holding the signs Jan’s touch had made like one of Horpyna’s talismans. “ _What does it say?”_

Finally, Khmelnytsky looked up. Anger flared momentarily in his shrewd eyes. “I don’t know, falcon,” he said. Bohun could have burned a thousand villages in that moment. “I don’t know.”

His lip curled. Still clutching the damned paper, Bohun spun on his heel, nails pressing bloody crescents into his skin.

“How can you not know?” he spat. “Aren’t you—lettered? Didn’t you get your own seal of nobility, _hetman?_ ” He thought he might laugh. He might sob.

Khmelnytsky closed his eyes. When he opened them he looked incredibly weary. “These aren’t letters, Jurko. Not normal ones.”

“How can they not be letters?”

Khmel’s gaze fell to Bohun’s clenched hands. “Who did you get this from?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Bohun said. He’d fought to steady his breathing, and now with dangerous quietude set his elbows on the table that served Khmel as a desk. “Tell me what you can make of it.”

_The young vatazhka was exactly the type of lowborn Cossack of which the prince often spoke. He burned like a force of nature, leaving chaos and corpses in his wake. Jan had seen it firsthand in Lwów. Careless, willful. A hero, lesser men said. Jan should have said he was a demon._

_He was beautiful in the firelight, the way the raging cataracts were beautiful. It was said that if a man stared too long into their depths he would go mad._

_“Don’t strike,” Jan rasped. “I would join you.”_

_He had not intended to meet him like this. The Cossack forces had overtaken him en route to Kijów, moving faster than Jan had expected. Jurko Bohun—Khmelnytsky’s most prized colonel. More unpredictable than Kryvonis, more easily swayed. Unlike Kryvonis, Bohun drank with noblemen. There had been some romance that came to light, a noblewoman of one of the older families. But Jeremi’s eyes had swept over Jan like a favored weapon, worn and molded to his hand, and said he’d heard other things too._

_“In any case, you should be able to find out something. Their positions, supplies, Khmel’s movements. Anything—_ more _, as well. It would do to reveal these rebels before the more credulous.” Jeremi turned, pacing. “Even in Warsaw, there are those who still insist they mean well._

 _“Rzędzian can tail you in Kijów, bring your messages to a contact.” The prince took a slim volume from a shelf: Kochanowski’s_ Fraszki. _Jan must have had the verses memorized by now, the letters and page numbers that spelled out the code. Their hands brushed on the book’s supple binding. Jan held the prince’s gaze, honored by the trust that he had placed in him. “You know the drill.”_

_“My prince.” It was all he could say._

_Jeremi smiled at him, a curve of thin lips that made Jan’s heart glow. “Go unnoticed. You did well in the Crimea, but to no avail. Here you can be of more service, not only to myself, but to our Commonwealth.”_

_The ataman—as Jan determinedly thought of him—was maddening in more than one way. Jan found himself longing to duel him._

_True, he might lose, but he wouldn’t have to see the man glaring at him, sorrowful and sullen by turn. Calling him “panie” like a resentful peasant—what did he mean by it? What cause had he to act like a spurned and vengeful lover, and to someone he thought Ruthenian at that? Jan had never met the Cossack before Lwów, though he racked his brain to think of some other reason._

_Just the sort of man that could not see his place in the natural order of things, Jan told himself. Yet at times Bohun was so magnificent he seemed to defy it in truth._

_Jan tried to shake those thoughts._

_He’d have liked to duel him. That was the best way to get the measure of a man. Growing up in Łubnie, a noble orphan and a ward of the prince, Jan had tumbled into bed with more than a few of his fellow trainees the same way. When Jeremi had taken him into a different, unseen type of service Jan found himself more often than not sent abroad to do much of the same thing._

_He and Michał had joked about the chances of it, drinking together before Jan left. The songs all mentioned Bohun’s beauty. Wishing him Godspeed with a kiss, Michał had urged him to stay safe, to come back alive._

_He shot a glance at the damnably handsome man. There was not quite a fully detached curiosity in it. Bohun’s hands moved over the strings of his teorban like a lover’s caress, slowly calling it to life. His lilting Ruthenian voice soon joined the tune, dark and sweet._

Demon _, Jan thought again._

 _“_ Myla, _farewell, for I must go!_

_How you will grieve full well I know.” Bohun answered himself, bitterly:_

_“My lover, no, be sure my heart_

_Will not be sad when you depart…_

_I mount one hill: another's set_

_For you to climb—Thus I forget."_

_But the song was not over, though Bohun fell again into silence, as though he played for himself alone. The music swelled towards the sky under his nimble fingers, jarring increasingly and going still. Something had happened; tragedy had struck. Jan found himself out of breath, reeled in like thread. It was more than the two lovers. It was a raging sea, an uncrossable barrier, a wide waving field in which one might lose himself, if he were lucky. But one could not…_

_When Bohun sang again Jan was almost startled. His voice, low and sorrowful, twined with the teorban’s plucked strings._

_"Ey, your dear soft lips, so closely sealed._

_How you talked to me, and love revealed…_

_Your dear red cheeks, how pale they lie!_

_They bloomed like a rose, when to war went I.”_

_Jan stilled. Bohun was looking at him across the fire, madness tinging his gaze._

_“Those dear black eyes that darkened be,_

_When I went to Ukraine, how they looked at me!”_

_The sound cut off abruptly, the silence almost dissonant as the ataman’s voice, gone tight, faded into the night. Bohun’s body hunched around the instrument, and Jan tilted his head, watching him. Something tugged at his chest, as if the spell still had its claws in him. He struggled briefly for mastery of himself, like stumbling._ Remember your duty, Skrzetuski. You can be of no small service.

_Jan was making his way back to the rented alcove along narrow, winding streets when he bumped into someone in the near-darkness. A ways behind him, a crowd spilled out onto the street from an alehouse, a flicker of life and light in an otherwise-sleeping town. Surely it was nothing. But Jan had just transferred his missive to Rzędzian and his nerves sang like razor wire. For just a moment, Jan looked back at the man he’d passed, towards the muted, distant lights of the tavern._

_Recognition flashed on the Cossack’s swarthy face and Jan’s heart stopped._

_“I know you,” Yashevski said, leaning in, smiling familiarly. He clapped Jan’s shoulder. It was familiarity a nobleman should not have allowed. And Jan had allowed it, supposing his person already dishonored, allowed it and more, when—_

_“We drank together. In Łubnie.”_

_They were quite alone and yet Jan wished he had not left Yashevski time to name the place._

_He forced a smile to his lips. The knife slid between Yashevski’s ribs with beautiful accuracy. Jan muffled the man’s dying cry with his gloved hand, forcing him back against the wall of the alley. Even in the dark, Yashevski’s eyes stood out, white around the pupil, full of hate and terror as he struggled to push Jan’s restraining weight away. He was stronger, broader. But the strength was seeping out of him as from a broken flask. When Jan yanked out the knife, pushing Yashevski away and into the dirt_ —it wouldn’t do to return to Bohun with blood on his clothes— _the emotion was freezing in those eyes, and Yashevski’s lips struggled to form their dying curse. Jan stood over him, sucking in panting breaths of the rank city air. The old taste of acid rose in his gorge. He swallowed it back._

_He’d see those eyes again in his dreams, he knew. But even then Jan couldn’t be sure which thought relieved him more that lonely, terrible night: that he had not outlived his usefulness to the prince, or that Jurko Bohun would continue to believe he loved him._

_Jurko—Bohun, he thought insistently, the ataman—had left to fight the prince’s men, and Jan’s friends, and every night he’d passed alone was sleepless. He couldn’t help how close he drew the other man, how he clung to his touch. He was alive. No ghost could look at him like that, could breathe so raggedly in his shirtsleeves, still covered in the sweat and dust of the road. Jan had told himself he didn’t know who he had feared for more. He had told himself he had no right to fear for the Cossack at all. But with Jurko in his arms, he felt the tension leave him all at once, like a sluice opening before a flood._

_Jurko didn’t wince as Jan tugged him closer, hungrily chasing his kisses, but something caught Jan’s eye—a blotch of crimson near the shoulder. Jan’s clutching at him must have broken open the wound. It was too apt, he thought, that his touch should bring him pain._

Or not pain _. The adrenaline of the hunt had blocked it out—that or some newer current that had shaken the man’s wild soul. Jurko grabbed at Jan’s hips, hungrily chasing his kisses. Unwillingly, gently, Jan pushed him away._

_Jurko’s eyes flicked open, questioning. He made to surge towards him again, but Jan frowned, seeing red flower faintly onto the sliced linen. His hand moved to the stain. “You’re hurt.”_

How are they to know better? _the prince had once said._ The laws in our Commonwealth are so loose that not half the scum are condemned that ought to be. But if they come into my hands, I never spare them.

I could—I could speak for him—

_He set the thought of Bohun, broken and bleeding, far away from him. Jan’s fingers moved with delicate care about torn skin and whole, pushing the shirt aside. Each touch reassured him. He was still there, still warm and alive, mad heart still beating._

_Jurko’s breath caught. That smallest, most vulnerable of gestures near brought tears to Jan’s eyes. He kissed him for it: when he kissed him, Jurko could not see the guilt on his face._

_His hands traced tanned skin marked by paler scars, some thin and small, others the knotted, ugly remnants of gashes that made Jan wince._

_“Ey, don’t trouble yourself,” Bohun said, sounding uncertain. “I don’t feel it with you, my dove.”_

_At the name Jan kissed him again, and Bohun answered with such passion that for a moment the wound was altogether forgotten._

_“Wait—” Jan managed. With soldierlike efficiency he tore a strip from the hem of his own shirt and wound it about the slice on Bohun’s arm, tying the thing as firmly as he could. Not quite clean, but it would serve until later. The momentary fear that Bohun had noticed how steady his hands were, how instinctive and strange the motion within four walls—Jan’s journey to his assignment in the Crimea had not always gone smoothly—was ill-founded. Jurko’s eyes were wide and focused on him. Jan had the sinking feeling that few people had treated him with loving-kindness enough to tend him._

_He kissed Bohun’s shoulder, where an especially gnarled scar stood out. It was old, fading into the swarthy shade of the Cossack’s skin. Had he sewn it up himself?_

Poor fool, _Jan thought, and wished he could unthink it. But the handsome ataman hero was a fool. It could not be otherwise, because Jan was no lover to him._

_“Rzędzian,” Jan said brusquely. The boy looked up at Jan’s taller height, red-faced in an afternoon already edged with frost._

_“Eh, sir?”_

_Jan wondered what he could say._ I can’t write these reports anymore. In honor, I find I no longer can—

Tell your contact to tell Jeremi he’ll have to send me somewhere else. The Cossack leadership knows my face but I would take a posting in a village, in the Crimea, in the way of the mob—

 _Jan fought to remember why it was worth betraying Jurko Bohun, why it was worth stopping sure-handed Khmelnytsky, why the blood spilled by their loyalists was purer than the blood Michał’s forces spilled over the dark earth in retribution. He thought of his noble brethren, of all the innocents caught against the peasant tide. Women in Tatar captivity. The great_ res publica _of the Commonwealth itself. All this did not inspire him. With effort, he fought to call up the prince’s image. Another dark-haired man with a charisma close to madness burning in his gaze. Jan swallowed, closing his eyes a moment, searching for the last dregs of passion, loyalty, and tenderness he had felt for this man._

Once you would have slit your own throat in a moment, had he only asked. And now you can’t write a few words? They have not even asked for Bohun’s death _._

And what will I do if they do?

_But Jan knew they would not. Whether he knew it or not, through his companion Bohun had become the most valuable of all the Cossack colonels in Jeremi’s eyes. The prince would not see him dead for the world, not while Jan was still of use._

_“Nothing,” he said. “Godspeed.”_

_At night he read Kochanowski in his native tongue to the dark-haired boy he wanted and felt the words burn too often leaving his lips._

_What more do you want from me? Is it still possible_

_To doubt my desire for you? The night, still restless in thoughts,_

_And these fiery stars, strewn over the sky,_

_Witness that I have nothing sweeter than you._

_Do you truly not wish you had a servant in me?_

_In truth, if love were tied to reason,_

_Scorn would move anyone, and then now_

_It would be better to be rid of master and service at once._

_But what then? Love has its customs,_

_It knows what’s better, but stays with what’s worse._

He could feel Jan’s breathing, the pulse of his hot blood where Bohun’s arm pinned his throat. Bohun hated him. He hated him for being so beautiful. He hated him for being with the damned lachy, for looking at him with those goddamned eyes. Hated the warm sweet smell of him, soft and familiar the way no one’s had grown in all Bohun’s years.

Bohun shook him hard, each blow forcing the slim, muscled body against the wall at his back so Jan’s breath was roughly stolen from him and his gasps brought no air in.

 _That’s right, lach._ The screams rising from burned castles and garrisons rang out in Bohun’s head, blocking out any other sound. He saw noblemen hanged by their ribs. Saw the women his men had dragged from their hiding places. The prisoners Khmelnytsky had placed into his special care. _That’s what I do. You were a fool to expect anything different._

_I was a fool to expect anything different._

“Jurko,” Jan gasped, one hand fluttering weakly at his wrist, trying to push it away. “ _Shcho z toboyu_?” The words were filled with all the hurt, outraged betrayal of a lover. Yet Jan’s eyes—Jan’s beloved eyes, warm and honest as Mother Earth, told him everything he needed to know. There was no betrayed look in their dark depths, only dull expectation. Jan was resigned to this. Jan had known it might have come to this.

Khmelnytsky had been right.

Bohun released him abruptly and staggered back like the boorish drunkard the cursed Pole probably thought he was. He pulled a knife and directed it vaguely in Jan’s direction, his grip on the hilt weak as a babe’s. Beneath the fine, embroidered linen, the Pole’s tanned chest was heaving with each desperate breath.

“Why did you lie with me in the steppe?”

 _Why ask? You already know the answer._ And yet something in Bohun demanded he hear it in Jan’s voice. Would not believe it, even now.

Bitterer words spoke, slithering in their familiar windings of rage and doubt. _Did you think it was for you? A man like him could have anyone he wanted._ And Bohun could no longer fight them back as a peasant staves off wild beasts and thorny weeds, as a man beats back the fire that comes to destroy him, with the clumsy weapon of _I am a Cossack hero, famous as any knight._

Jan’s hands rose to cover his face, head falling into his hands. He leaned heavily against the wall at his back.

“Why?” Bohun’s voice, rough and snarled with emotion, had turned almost pleading. He cut off the words, choking on his shame.

Jan looked up at him.

“To gain your trust,” he said, brokenly. “I’m in the service of Jeremi Wiśniowiecki.”

And there it was in the open. Jan had not spoken with difficulty. The words, in their ease, their specificity, seemed foreign. Jan might as well be a book, a paper written in letters and a numbered cipher, scrawled out in his tilting, elegant hand.

 _But I’ve cracked your code, little dove,_ he thought with an empty sense of triumph. _I’ve_ read _you._

Bohun threw the knife in his hand at the floor between their feet. It clattered dully on the floorboards.

“I’m with the lachy, Jurko.”

Somehow, it meant something that Jan offered the uncommunicable thing in his own words, bare words meant to reach him, with no cipher. Little, but something.

He hadn’t denied it. He hadn’t run.

Jan still stood as if pinned against the wall. Bohun drank him in in the low light, committing his features to memory the way he had the symbols on the page. Then he froze. Jan’s lashes, his amber eyes were dark with tears.

When had Bohun’s wild heart grown so soft? It took all the strength he had not to cross the room and go to him, to kiss his cheek and take him in his arms—

 _Another trick._ The thought sounded like Khmelnytsky’s. Bohun shoved it aside.

“How would you like to die?”

The pain and doubt of the lach’s treachery had roiled in him for weeks now. He’d turned it over in his head each night once Jan’d fallen asleep, gnawing at it like a starving dog. Suddenly the storm had settled. Bohun’s harsh voice, rough-edged, approached gentleness.

Jan let out a muffled sob. His knees gave out, and he slid down the wall to the floor; though the Pole was taller, Bohun looked down at him, and Jan looked up.

“Only hold me,” Jan whispered. “Let me—let me—”

Bohun’s breath had been stolen, vanished into the still air between them, the motes of dust swirling in the low sunlight that rendered Jan’s pale face golden.

Jan’s fist covered his mouth to stifle another sob. Now his sweet lips were visible again. He spoke with effort, but low and trembling and even, like a lute string struck. The words reverberated in him as in an instrument’s cherrywood body. “In your arms, Jurko.”

Bohun let out a cry and turned aside. If he had been more in his head, he might have thought it a trick. Now he no longer cared.

_Ey, Christ, if I take him in my arms meaning to feel him go limp and cold against me, if I struck his soft throat or his beating heart with steel, all I’d want is to die too._

“Jurko?” Jan whispered.

“Fuck you, lach whore,” Bohun spat. Horrified, he heard his own voice tremble. He struck at the wall as he never could have struck the man who’d become his lover. It stung. That was good. “May you be damned for eternity. Let demons come and drag you screaming to hell.”

Jan held his gaze.

 _He isn’t afraid,_ Bohun thought, more horrified than ever—or at least, so it seemed to him. The world spun wildly from its axis, jumbling the bare floorboards of their room, and he clutched at the wall to steady himself, forcing splinters to catch on the meat of his palms. _He isn’t afraid, and here I am._

“Goddamn you,” Bohun swore. “God fucking damn you, watching me like that, when you know damn well how you’ve unmanned me.”

At that the Pole he’d taken to his bed reached back as if to catch his balance, even though he already sat half in a heap on the floor.

And he still looked at him as if he didn’t know!

Before Bohun’s astonished eyes, Jan’s head tipped back a little, exposing his throat. His dark eyes slipped closed. He seemed to hold his shuddering breath.

“Do it,” he whispered. “Be quick. I know I have no right to ask…”

Bohun stared at him. The knife glinted dully on the floor between them, and Bohun’s heart was a knot in his chest.

He stood again before Helena, before Rozłogi’s ruins, and froze at that threshold. _God’s teeth, I’m unmanned in truth. Kill him! Kill him, or he’ll hurt you!_ Bohun swayed on the spot, dizzy, the white plaster of the room becoming endless snow, fields with no dark tree offering shelter. He could walk no further on rag-wrapped feet. He couldn’t fight the cold. No brave Cossack hero could.

He fell to his knees under the weight of the abyss opening before him. In Jan’s pale throat he saw the black, churning waters of the Nenasytets. Let the devils there drag him to hell! This time he would not survive it.

Jan had tensed, trembling, but revealed no more fear than that. He was a soldier in truth, Bohun thought. His breaths were coming unevenly now, and he shoved his knuckles against his teeth to stop a cry of pain that raggedly escaped.

 _Ey, lach, if I knew where your words were kept in my body, I would reach between my ribs and tear them out! I would force them back down your throat like so much jagged glass_.

Jan opened his eyes. The sight of amber like evening sunlight, darkened by tears, made Bohun moan like a wounded animal.

“Ey, you’ve ruined me.” The word ‘whore’ would not leave his lips a second time, no matter how he searched for it. Bohun gestured to the knife with a quick, too-fragile hand, the other a white-knuckled fist. “Yours.” It was a growl, a sob.

“You’re mad,” Jan said, startled into near laughter. The Polish words might have been colored by something like wonder: Bohun did not care to know.

“Yes. Mad.” Bohun grinned like a wolf, red-toothed. He was. _I’m not afraid_. But when he inhaled the words breathed from Jan’s dark eyes, making him faint with their power. They did not sound like poetry coming from his lips: Bohun did not recite, he sang. They lilted with the melody of it, the pattern of Jan’s voice transposed to his Ruthenian tones like a kobzar’s love song, like one of Horpyna’s incantations. “O głupie, o myśli szalone! Czego ja pragnę? O co ja, nieszczęsny, stoję? Patrząc na cię, wszytkę władzą straciłem swoję.” _O stupid, crazy thoughts! For what do I long? For what am I standing here, an unhappy man? Looking at you, I lost all my power._

Jan had not reached for the blade. Yet now his hand stretched closer. ~~~~

“Jurko.” There was a painful tightness in his voice. “I can’t—I…”

Bohun shook his head. Laughter bubbled dangerously inside in him, threatening to escape. How could it have ended any other way? “Don’t explain, lach.” _Do it!_

“I have never…” He heard Jan swallow. “If I were to ask one thing for myself…”

_What?_

Jan reached to him, not the knife, fingertips scrabbling against the floorboards. “It would be you. It would have been you, Jurko.”

Bohun stared at that sunlit hand like a drowning man.

“Don’t lie to me, panie.” They were cracked, threadbare, a child’s words. “Please. Don’t lie, I beg you.”

“It’s true. And it was true when I said I loved you. That was the only truth in all of it, Jurko.”

Bohun looked at him with haunted eyes.

“I didn’t mean to,” Jan said. “I don’t let it happen. But you… you…” He waved a shaking hand, as if to indicate everything about Bohun at once, smiling ruefully. “You must… it must be like this often.” Bohun looked blankly at him. _No, laszku, no_. “You drew me to you, like something in you was calling out to me, making me answer. As if you were… how could you _not_ be beloved? How could I not love you?”

He did not understand, and surely it showed on his face. The knowledge Jan held crackled with warmth like a hearthfire. Bohun did not recognize himself there, ragged and cold.

"I—I know I’m tainted, by this service. But it has been in honor—for the greater good, the common weal—it began that way. I’m weak, Jurko, and my weakness overtook me. I don’t see clearly anymore. Perhaps I never did, and my heart simply found another master. If you killed me it would be done in honor. I would not… I already forgave you it.”

 _No!_ Bohun stared, stricken. The idea made his heart clench in his chest. “I couldn’t!”

Jan met his gaze, and Bohun was startled by all he saw there: an ache that was not empty, hungry like his own, but a deep well, a tumbled riverbed. He wondered how he had not seen it before. “Then what?” The words were a whisper.

“Stay with me.” It was a dying man’s prayer.

Jan choked on a sob. “You don’t expect I’ll slit your throat in the night?”

“I don’t care,” Bohun said. That much was true.

Jan did sob then, and Bohun reached for him clumsily, with bruised and bleeding hands. He took the man he had not known at all in his arms all too violently, and yet he thought Jan sighed as he drew him close, their crumpled limbs tangling together.

“Jurko—” Bohun thought he heard that riverbed in his voice, the weight of pain rushing silently above it. “You can’t—”

Bohun clutched him closer; Jan turned his face against his shoulder, dark, cropped hair warm under Bohun’s greedy fingers. “It’s not for you to tell a free Cossack what he can and cannot do.” _He wants me_ , he thought. _He wants me!_ “I won’t let you.”

Jan trembled and Bohun thought, disbelievingly, that it might be in hope.

“We could leave together—we could go anywhere. Do anything. I’d never let anything hurt you again.” It was a growl, a promise against Jan’s pain, a pain that confused Bohun with how different it was to his own. He didn’t know how to fight it. It didn’t matter. He would fight it all the same, if it stood between him and the man who, impossibly, loved him. “But don’t ask me to let you go. Don’t ask! It would tear out my own heart.”

_Once, Jan would have steeled himself and done it._

“Stay. I swear you won’t regret it.” He kissed Jan’s knuckles, the Pole’s hand clutched in his own shaking ones. He knew he gripped too tightly, but could not bring himself to loosen his hold. “Stay and tell me about the man who loves me. Tell me about the soul I love, little bird, if I did not know him before. Name what you want—castles, silks, yellow gold. I would make you an emperor, a pasha. You could live like a prince in the steppe.” _Only tell me what would be the key to you. What would stave your pain away. I’ll give it to you—I promise I can! I’m no peasant but a Cossack ataman, with two thousand men at my command._

“You, Jurko,” Jan said. His voice broke. “And duty.”

“Then stay. Make me happy.”

And he did.

**Author's Note:**

> Links to the poems referenced in Polish: [Do Magdaleny,](https://literat.ug.edu.pl/fraszki/071.htm) [Do Miłości,](https://literat.ug.edu.pl/fraszki/066.htm) [Do Dziewki](https://literat.ug.edu.pl/fraszki/068.htm) (if you notice anything horribly ruined, letting me know would be a great kindness! Since there are so few people in this fandom I went for surprise over consultation)  
> & link to the source on Bohun's (already translated) folk songs--anachronistic but I nearly had him sing something written in 1979 so what can you do really: [x](http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/livesay/ukraina/ukraina.html)
> 
> Don't worry, Helena is totally alive and okay in this au, she just escaped to be with Anusia instead!
> 
> Comments fuel me <3


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